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In a separate title-page vignette for The
Cricket on the Hearth in the American Household Edition of Dickens's
collected Christmas Stories (one of just three
such full-page illustrations in the series of twenty-eight), E. A. Abbey
focuses not one of the novella's principals — John and Dot Peerybingle
— or even on the secondary characters around whom the subplot of
the lost son revolves (Caleb and Bertha Plummer, the toymakers), but on the
comic woman on the melodrama as represented by the gangly, androgynous
orphan Tilly Slowboy. Abbey's choice is especially surprising in light of the
contemporary interest in Dot Peerybingle, as evidenced by Dion Boucicault's popular
1859 adaptation Dot, A Drama in Three Acts,
first performed at New York's Winter Garden, and many times afterwards in
various New England centres, most pertinently perhaps at both Boston's Liberty
Hall and Opera House in 1874, as well as at the Music Hall in Lowell,
Massachusetts, in that same year. Abbey might well have travelled north from
New York City to see one of these productions, although he would certainly
have found it easier three years earlier to see Boucicault's adaptation at Booth's
in New York City in November, 1871.

Although, as Henry James has suggested of Abbey's mature style, the
simple line drawing is a "direct, immediate, solicitous study of the particular
case" (the Peerybingles' adolescent nurse), in choosing her as his focal
character Abbey has hardly "steered clear of the danger of making
his people theatrical types" (James), although he lovingly depicts the infant
and the rocking cradle which give Tilly her present purpose in life. The style,
like the composition itself, is minimalist — to Abbey in this scene
nothing else matters. Consequently, the Sixties style, of which this full-page
woodblock engraving is a fine example, offers a sharp departure from the
humorous detailism of Punch cartoonist
John Leech, as well as from the elaborate
engravings of the other original illustrators:
Daniel Maclise,
Richard Doyle, Edwin Landseer, and
Clarkson Stanfield. If one may judge from
her besotted expression which implies that she is a kindly "natural," the
foundling Tilly clearly dotes upon the infant whom the Peerybingles have placed
in her charge. Her dress is patched but utterly lacking in ornamentation —
indeed, as the text stipulates, it is little more than a shift, implying her
background as an orphan. The passage illustrated is Dickens's detailed
description of Tilly which occurs four pages later, implying a proleptic reading
of the picture, an initial impression that is clarified by encountering this
textual moment after seeing the image:

"Don't let the dear child fall under the grate, Tilly, whatever you
do!"

It may be noted of Miss Slowboy, in spite of her rejecting the
caution with some vivacity, that she had a rare and surprising talent for
getting this baby into difficulties: and had several times imperilled its short
life, in a quiet way peculiarly her own. She was of a spare and straight shape,
this young lady, insomuch that her garments appeared to be in constant danger
of sliding off those sharp pegs, her shoulders, on which they were loosely hung.
Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all possible
occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular structure; also for affording
glimpses, in the region of the back, of a corset, or pair of stays, in colour a
dead-green. Being always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and
absorbed, besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress's perfections
and the baby's, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors of judgment, may be said to
have done equal honour to her head and to her heart; and though these did less
honour to the baby's head, which they were the occasional means of bringing into
contact with deal doors, dressers, stair-rails, bedposts, and other foreign
substances, still they were the honest results of Tilly Slowboy's constant
astonishment at finding herself so kindly treated, and installed in such a
comfortable home. For, the maternal and paternal Slow-boy were alike unknown to
Fame, and Tilly had been bred by public charity, a foundling; which word, though
only differing from fondling by one vowel's length, is very different in
meaning, and expresses quite another thing. [Chirp the First," p. 80]

A comparable moment in the original 1845 series is John Leech's
"John's Arrival", in which Tilly, seated in the
rocker, struggles to hold the baby (right foreground) while Dot sets the table in
preparation for John's arrival in "Chirp the First." Leech's focus is the kettle
on the hearth and the numerous fairies emanating from its steaming spout. She
appears a second time in a thumbnail by Leech entitled
"Tilly Slowboy", which again features the
solid rocker, the nursing stool, and an angular Tilly tipping the "precious
darling" backwards (p. 89). The loving detail with which Abbey has conveyed
the details of Tilly's visage is a sharp departure from Leech's caricature.

For alternate versions of Tilly Slowboy, see details of the two
illustrations by John Leech below, and the much more sympathetic large-scale
wood-engraving by Fred Barnard from the British Household Edition just
two years after Abbey's series Essentially a satirical cartoonist, Leech does not
extend his sympathy to the awkward adolescent nurse, who for him is merely a
comic character who establishes the inclusive atmosphere of the Peerybingle
household. In contrast, Barnard finds something endearing about Tilly and her
fascination with the "precious darling." Indeed, by juxtaposing her against the family
dog (Boxer) based on the relationship between these two guardians of the hearth and
home in Leech's "John's Arrival," Fred Barnard has reconceived Tilly as an image of
domestic devotion:

Other nineteenth-century illustrations of Tilly Slowboy by John Leech (1845) and Fred Barnard (1878)